The Development of the Late Adolescent Social Support Inventory and an Examination of Social Support\u27s Impact on Depression in Adolescents

The current study set out to create the Late Adolescent Social Support Inventory (LASSI), a scale designed to measure adolescents\u27 perception of the availability of social support in each of House\u27s (1981) four types of social support and to explore the relationship between depression and types of social support in adolescents. There were 120 participants recruited from Central Illinois high schools and Eastern Illinois University. Participants completed the LASSI as well as the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale Revised (CESD-R; Eaton, Muntaner, Smith, Tien, & Ybarra, 2004). Due to the low number of participants recruited, we were unable to conduct factor analysis on the LASSI items but results indicate all items have high internal consistency. All correlations of the types of social support with the CESD-R were negative. Results of the multiple regression analysis indicated the four predictors explained 20% or more of the variance, but none of the individual slopes in the model were significant. There was a significant main effect of support type scores overall, but no significant interaction between support types and depression scores